The Arrangement

by Ashley Warlick

  “Clearly,” he said. He spun the sherry in its glass.

  In his mother’s letter yesterday, she said the X-ray treatments had done little for his father’s pain, less for his cancer. Blood was the most efficient conduit. And Herbert was still in China; it was unlikely he would ever take a wife and come back home.

  The evening slipped away outside the kitchen window, the candles finding the underside of Mary Frances’s profile, her straight, true jaw. She’d paused when he mentioned children, but the mention was so buried, he couldn’t tell how to read her best. It was up to him, he supposed, to bring it up again.

  He stood, pulling his shirt free from his pants. “I’ll get cleaned up,” he said, and left for the bedroom.

  In the skillet, fat burned, then blackened. Mary Frances snapped to it, nudging the pan with a dishtowel. She wiped out the skillet with a piece of newspaper and began again, this time screwing her attention tight. She browned onions and garlic, and from the pot on the windowsill, chopped a few winter-sad leaves of tarragon. The smell was green and strong, and she thought of spring.

  Spring in Dijon, when she and Al would hike into the mountains with the Club Alpin, the old women forever chiding her tentative steps, her newborn French: la petite violette, violette américaine. She would turn back to Al, annoyed, and he would laugh. Hardly his delicate flower. When they stopped for lunch, it was Mary Frances with the soufflé of calves’ brains, whatever was made of liver or marrow, ordering enough strong wine that everyone was laughing. The way home, the women let her be.

  If she wanted calves’ brains now, she wouldn’t even know where to begin to look or how to pay. She and Al seemed to be living on vegetables and books, tobacco, quiet. She blanched a bunch of spinach and chopped it. She beat eggs with the tarragon, heated the skillet once again. There was a salad of avocados and oranges. There was a cold bottle of ale and bread. Enough, for tonight.

  Her own mother had relied on cooks, on the larder and the icebox, on there always being plenty, but in France there had never been a place to store plenty, and Mary Frances had learned how to manage day to day. She supposed Al had learned too, not necessarily how he might expect to be cared for, not meat and potatoes, coffee and cake, but rather something back and forth, give and take. A conversation. She took up the dishtowel again and slid the skillet beneath the broiler. Such a conversation with Al might be the safest kind these days.

  He returned to the kitchen asking if she wanted to go for drinks at the Parrishes.

  Mary Frances steadied herself against the edge of the stove. He held the invitation in his hand.

  “Isn’t Gigi out of town?” she said.

  “I’m sure she’s back by now. A welcome home?” Al snapped the card against his palm. “We haven’t seen them in too long.”

  “No,” she said. “We haven’t.”

  She had been so stupid. Of course, there would still be parties. There would still be drinks and dinners and movies and card games with the Parrishes, and whatever sparkling thing that used to happen when she caught Tim’s eye across the table would never happen anymore because she had been unable to leave it at that. Because she could not leave well enough alone.

  There was a fast slip in her thoughts, and suddenly Tim’s skin against her palms, as real as if she’d touched him, and then only her hands again, fishing for the last knife in the dishwater. The simplest responses failed her. She pulled the frittata from the oven, sliced wedges of it for herself and Al, dressed the salad, cracked the ale, and laid the table. Al bowed his head in thanks; what was there to do but what they’d done before? They bent to their meal, and ate.

  * * *

  Across the valley, dinner was already cooling in its plates. Gigi had made soup, silvery dumplings of fat floating on the surface of the bowls, a hunk of something still smoking in the kitchen. They had almost laughed, it was so bad, and called dinner off completely. Tim was too hard upon the gin to really care.

  In the living room, Gigi sat at the piano, plinking out a song she was supposed to learn for the Busby Berkeley picture, the next one where she would play a girl with legs. It was the best Tim could figure it; she had no lines, no part in a story, but she and ninety-nine others like her would all put their legs together and call it a dance number. He tipped the gin into his mouth. She couldn’t play piano either. She was twenty-two years old. What difference did it make if she could sing and dance? He loved her, god, and he was sorry about Mary Frances.

  The thing was, Gigi wasn’t sorry. Gigi was finished.

  He went to the kitchen doorway and watched her stuttering between the singing and the playing. Her hair was lifted off the back of her neck and held with a comb. The song was about being shy.

  “Here,” he said.

  He rested his glass on the bench, his arms coming around her, and she accepted his closeness as she might a seamstress or a nurse. She watched his hands at the chords, her small voice free now to do the rising, and she filled her lungs, almost proud. She found the chorus, how her words were in her heart, and Tim held the last notes with her as long as she was able.

  She leaned back into his chest for a moment, and thanked him.

  “Can’t we talk?” he said.

  She was already gathering the music, gathering herself away from him. They had talked so much these past few days, but Tim still thought there was something else he could offer her. Just one last thing.

  She didn’t look at him. “I’ve got early rehearsals tomorrow. I need to get to bed.”

  She leaned from the waist and kissed his brow. If he’d worn a tie, she’d have straightened it. He remembered her suddenly as just a girl with her braids in her mouth, bent over her primer, painfully reading to him in Latin, her foot beneath the table atop his own. She was always touching him, petting him, but he suspected now it was something she did without meaning to.

  But she was sure, of course she was sure. Of course.

  “We can work this out,” he said. “If you—”

  “But I won’t. We can’t.” She put a hand to his cheek; there was a kind of pleasure in her voice to tell him no. “And anyways, I was thinking how you won’t be alone for very long. The men you know are not alone. They all have wives.”

  “Gigi—”

  “You’ll find another one.”

  She backed away, butting against the piano bench, jangling his empty glass. She passed it to him, wiping the ring of sweat with her hand. “You should call the ice man in the morning,” she said. Her exit then: a swirl of skirt and green perfume.

  John Weld was a screenwriter or a stuntman, maybe both. He and Gigi had known each other since the spring before, and she was not ashamed of herself in the least. It couldn’t be helped who you fell in love with, she said. Which was the excuse of a child, he said, and when would she ever grow up. But he’d made it all the easier for her, what with Mary Frances.

  He took the last of his drink to the French doors, the night garden visible through his reflection in the panes, the woolly arm of a juniper, the floss silk tree and its bulbous trunk, near-monsters from where he stood. A stuntman, for chrissake—a man who did dangerous things other people took credit for.

  He let the night grow late, and kept his glass full.

  * * *

  He woke in daylight, late morning, Gigi standing in front of his chair like a woman on the edge of a diving board.

  “Everyone is still coming for drinks,” she said.

  “Yes?” Tim sighed, looked out at the terrace, the short shadows of the neighbor’s palms. He felt as if time shimmered out there somewhere, had failed to pass the way it usually did. Goddamn Laurel Canyon. “Everyone?”

  “The Fishers, the Sheekmans. Nan and whoever.”

  Gigi wore an apron over her blouse, printed with apples. She held a wooden spoon by the bowl instead of the handle and looked at him expectantly. When had she beco
me this person who wanted him to break? She turned back to the kitchen, her house shoes clapping loosely on her small feet.

  “I’ll go for ice,” he said, and left by the terrace door.

  * * *

  He was just coming home hours later when the Fishers’ Chrysler pulled beside him in the drive.

  “Old man,” Al said, and Tim turned around, a bag of ice dripping on the dark canvas of his loafers. “What the devil are you doing?”

  Al leaned across Mary Frances’s lap to speak through her open window, and she put a hand to his shoulder, her left hand, her wedding ring suddenly so plain. They were friends, for god’s sake. They’d all been friends for years.

  Tim smiled at them. “Hello.”

  He looked different to her now, his face handsome in its angles and shadows, his face above her in the half-light of his bedroom, as she would always see him now. He leaned against the window talking to Al, his mouth making sounds she could not seem to collect into words, his hands cupping the doorframe, his long fingers. Her insides reeled.

  “Are you all right?” she said finally.

  Tim looked at her and spoke, and she supposed he answered her question. He smiled, and she laughed, and Al did the same. Tim slapped the door of the car and stood, walking away, waving over his shoulder as he disappeared behind the house.

  Mary Frances felt the breath she was holding give out.

  “Good lord,” Al said. “What happened to him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He looks awful. He looks run through. I mean, really. Do you think he’s ill?”

  “Ill?”

  Al glanced at her, and Mary Frances closed her eyes, her mouth, the parts of her not to be trusted. “You didn’t notice?” he asked. And then, “Darling. You must learn to pay attention.”

  She shook her head. The next few hours seemed impossible, literally impossible, like boulders to be thrown uphill. But then Al opened her door, she took his arm, yanking on the thumb of her short black glove as he raised his hand to knock, and she was headlong into it.

  Gloria answered, Gloria Sheekman now. She was squealing glad to see them both.

  “You know,” she said. She braced Al’s back with the flat of her hand, exceptionally strong for her size, her hair the color of snow today. “Timmy’s disappeared.”

  “Ah. Not really,” Al said.

  “Really. Gigi said he went for ice, but his car’s still in the drive.”

  “Let me get you a drink, Gloria,” Al said. “Introduce me to your latest husband.”

  “You’re such a grouch, Al.” She leaned to kiss Mary Frances. She smelled of roses and gin. “Get yourself a drink.”

  She made like they were taking coats and butted Mary Frances down the hall, talking, talking. The lights were on in the master bedroom. “And Gigi is a flutterby, in and out. She’s wearing an apron, for god’s sake.”

  “Gloria. I wear an apron sometimes.”

  “Not when you’ve spent the last two weeks in a tin can with twenty other girls, you don’t. Something’s fishy.” She looked off absently. “Maybe she’s pregnant.”

  Mary Frances swallowed. “You just want somebody else in dutch with the studio.”

  “Studio, schmudio. I’ve got a new daddy now.”

  The Love Captive had been in the theaters for weeks; Gloria played a hypnotized ingenue, wandering around the screen for an hour until her fiancé broke the spell. The papers had slayed the movie and made Gloria sound as if she were well accustomed to mindless wanderings herself. It didn’t matter; it was her last picture with Universal. Hollywood was changing. There were rules now, laws even, and reputations like Gloria’s had become problematic; starlets didn’t divorce. Still, she seemed to have landed on her feet. She couldn’t quit talking about this Busby Berkeley showstopper, mostly because Gigi had a part too, a smaller one, a chorus girl.

  “She’s had the longest girlhood in the history of girls,” Gloria said. “Does she think she’ll be a girl forever?”

  Mary Frances lifted her shoulders to say she didn’t know, and then there she was, Gigi, around the corner from the foyer, the hem of her apron balled up in her hand. Underneath the apron, she wore a slender dress of blue crepe that rustled as she stopped and started again toward them.

  “Gloria, you stop making fun of me,” Gigi said. She leaned close to press Mary Frances’s cheek. “How nice to see you.”

  “Oh, Gigi,” Mary Frances said. And then, “You know I don’t believe a word.”

  Gloria sighed. “I’m just jealous, darling. I was never so young as you.”

  Gigi patted her hair back from her face, her smile a flashbulb at close range, and Mary Frances felt dizzy, caught in their stutter-step. She remembered Tim saying how he told Gigi everything, everything. Then Gloria called them all her little birds and butterflies, and wasn’t it time for a drink.

  “I’ll be right along,” Gigi said, and passed through toward the bedroom.

  “Oh, damn,” Gloria whispered. “How much of that should I take back?”

  “All of it,” Mary Frances said. “In fact, let’s just start over from the top.”

  Gloria stuck a long finger in her side. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I need that drink. And two more just like it.”

  “That’s my girl.” Gloria flung her armful of coats onto the drafting table in Tim’s studio and ushered them to the living room. A half-dozen pink poinsettias filled the hearth. The holidays.

  * * *

  Tim pulled a candy-colored V-neck over his head, a sweater Gigi had given him last Christmas because she said it made him look as if he played golf at the club. He didn’t play golf at the club and never wore the thing, but she was right, the light peach made his skin seem as if he hadn’t been drinking five days straight. He’d cut himself with the razor and tried to think it wasn’t because his hands were shaking. He pressed a pad of toilet paper to his chin. He couldn’t stay in here any longer.

  When he opened the door to the bedroom, Gigi was curled over herself on the end of the bed, her face swollen and wet. It was the first he’d seen her cry since he’d met her at the train station, about all of this, the first time.

  “Dear,” he said. “Please.”

  “Please what?” Her voice was cool.

  “I can send everybody home, Gigi. I can bring you a cup of tea, and we don’t even have to talk about it. We can sort it all out in the morning.”

  As he offered this, he felt the pressure in his head lifting like weather. He realized how much he wanted her to admit this was hard. How much he would enjoy going to the living room and dispatching everyone back to their cars. Gigi has a headache. Gigi has a touch of something. He loved her so much in this moment, more than ever before, and how cruel that was.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Truly. I’m better.”

  She pressed her small white hand to her cheeks, one and then the other. She smoothed the coverlet away from her hips, smoothed her smooth blue skirt. He could see her drawing herself up, her back straight, her face finding the light. He waited; her pride could still push her either way.

  “I don’t know what came over me.” She smiled, and he knew how they would present themselves for the remainder of the evening. She hadn’t even asked where he had been.

  And in the living room, somebody played the piano badly. Somebody delivered a punch line, and laughter broke. There was the delicate ping of ice to glass, and into this came Tim in his candy-colored sweater. The men shook his hand and clapped his back, and some of their wives leaned to kiss his cheek. Some of those wives were Gigi’s friends. Tim wondered how many of them knew what was going on.

  He could see, suddenly, the invisible mapwork between these people, like the paths through this neighborhood between the houses of men and their lovers. He thought of Mary Frances, not his lover r
eally, but now something more than what she had been. He watched her through the arches of the doorways, her voice bustling with the others: her prim, private school features, then her laughter like a low-cut blouse. Where did women like her get made?

  She saw him, too; she held a glass in front of her as one might hold out a hand in greeting. He waved, and she came to sit beside him at the piano, a little too close, but what did it matter, really. Perhaps she had been drinking too.

  “Your advice, Dr. Parrish?” she said. “Editorial or otherwise.” She rested her elbows on the fallboard and surveyed the room, her lips pursed, her brow inclined.

  He could not rise to the occasion. “I have no idea what to say, Mary Frances.”

  “All right,” she said. “First of all, you should have told me to go home.”

  She was being deliberately smart, painfully so, and Tim scrubbed his face with his hands. He wished he had not waved her over. She was going to keep talking.

  “It’s too late for that, though, isn’t it,” she said. “Second of all? I don’t have a second of all.”

  She looked away, across the party. He studied the sheet music, the same song Gigi had been playing for weeks, studied the seam of Mary Frances’s stocking where it left her shoe. She began to hum, and then to sing the horrible, horrible song about hearts.

  “Gigi has fallen in love with someone else,” he said.

  “Tim.” She smiled. “That’s not funny.”

  “She’s fallen in love with a man closer to her own age, and she wants to be with him. She wants a divorce.”

  “Well. I hear they’re all the rage at Paramount.”

  Ice rattled in her glass. It would have been worse if she said something mild, if she said something kind or comforting. “I haven’t told anyone, obviously—”

  “You’re serious? Christ,” and now he could hear the bleed of liquor in her voice, each word too carefully placed.

  “Yes. Well.”

  “Oh, Tim. We ought to find me a conscience. There must be one of those around here somewhere.”

  He put his head into his hands. He wished, suddenly, he could talk to Al, tell him everything, and also that everything was something else. Mary Frances was right, of course. He should have told her to go home, he should have been true to his wife, this was all his fault. He turned to her again, and in the second before she could collect herself, he caught a glimpse of whatever raw, throbbing thing she was trying to cover up, and his chest came loose entirely.